This story is amazing, highlighting just how recent our sins of slavery were and how monumental an Obama presidency would be.

Amanda Jones, 109, the daughter of a man born into slavery, has lived a life long enough to touch three centuries. And after voting consistently as a Democrat for 70 years, she has voted early for the country’s first black presidential nominee.

A really cool, if regrettably short, article about the town of Baarle-Hertog in Belgium.

Baarle-Hertog borders the Netherlands – but, because of its unique history of political division, the town is sort of marbled with competing national loyalties. In other words, pockets of the town are Dutch; most of the town is Belgian. You can thus wander from country to country on an afternoon stroll, as if island-hopping between sovereignties. [via BoingBoing]

Believe it or not, Los Angeles used to have the finest public transportation around, thanks in part to Henry Huntington. There was the Pacific Electric Railway company AKA “The Red Cars” which had streetcar lines reaching to the San Fernando Valley, Santa Monica, and Santa Ana and there was the competing Los Angeles Railway (LARy) that was also known as the “Yellow Cars.” They were ripped out in the early ’60s and soon afterwards Los Angeles became synonymous with traffic snarls and freeway shootings. Some historical background can be found here. And here’s this youtube clip from LA Curbed about the last days of the LA Railways. Sigh.

Brian Eno and Kevin Kelly published a list of unthinkable futures 15 years ago in the Whole Earth Catalog. Now you can read in here. [via Boing Boing]

A very cute cartoon series about pandas and the recent Sichuan earthquake.

You all will be glad to know that the 61-year old British grandmother who started running around the world in 2003 has returned back to the UK in spite of being approached by a drunken guy with a bloody ax in Siberia, encountering a polar bear, and receiving 29 marriage proposals.

Summer Palace is film I always suspected would get made. The events of Tiananmen Squareprotests of 1989 were so dramatic and cinematic that it naturally captures the imagination of artists. During the protests — starting from Hu Yaobang‘s death on April 15 through to the government’s bloody crackdown on June 4th/5th — youth in China experience a sort of condensed version of the 1960s. Imagine the Free Speech Movement, Woodstock, and Kent State all jammed into six weeks and you get the picture.

Not unlike the American government in the ’80s, the post-Tiananmen Square government distracted its citizens with a heady combination of economic boom times and virulent nationalism. The Chinese government had to as the protests called into question its very legitimacy. Almost 20 years later, most of the main student leaders of the protests are still exiled. Though the romantic sweep of those spring months still command the imagination, talkin about the protests publicly carries grave risks. Director Lou Ye — who graduated from Beijing University in 1989 — was banned from making movies for five years as punishment for making this film.

Summer Palace was screen in competition in Cannes and was hailed not only for its political daring, but also frank sexuality. As J. Hoberman of the Village Voice noted, not only is this movie the most sexually explicit film to come out of China, it’s more explicit than the six runner-ups combined. Though the pairing of sex and politics is a long one in cinema, Lou Ye’s film is notClosely Watched Trainsor even The Dreamers. It’s a portrait of a lost generation.

Yu Hong (played by Lei Hao) is a willful sullen lass from the North Korean border who, once she gets to a Beijing university, plunges headlong into the messy abundance of life. This includes exploring her sexuality with (among others) her fellow student Zhou Wei (Xiaodong Guo). At first, the two are insanely happy, stealing away into an empty dorm room for frankly depicted quickies. But as the protests start ramping up in the background, doubt and suspicion seeps into their own private eden. Yu Hong becomes jealous and Zhou Wei starts sleeping with Yu Hong’s erstwhile best friend Li Ti. As the crackdown explodes around them, Yu has a nervous breakdown and flees Beijing, leaving Zhou behind. Up until this point, the film mirrors the youthful energy of the characters with a tone that’s both giddy and nervous. The camera, frequently hand-held, feels voyeuristic.

After the crackdown, the movie speeds past other major Chinese historical milestones — like the Hong Kong handover — before catching up with Zhou and Yu in the present. Zhou lives as an intellectual in Berlin and continues to make unfulfilling love to Li Ti. Yu sports a bad haircut and shacks up with a married guy out of loneliness. Both seem still seem traumatized by these unhealing scars from the past. The parallels between these two wounded ex-lovers and between China and its intellectuals are clear though not overbearing. Thankfully, Lou Ye roots the drama in the characters rather than an allegory. The regret and dull existential panic these Yu and Zhou felt of hitting your 30s and feeling your life slip out of sight is both palpable here and universal. And that’s what lingered in my mind days after watching it.

Summer Palace is not a perfect film. It sometimes veers close to the self-indulgence and the structure gets unwieldy in places. It is, though, a haunting and glorious mess.

One of the perks of working at my current job is that I get to watch free advanced movie screenings. The other day I watched Erroll Morris‘ Standard Operating Procedure. While his last film Fog of War, which I think is a masterpiece, examines a failed American war from the point of view of its architect, Robert McNamara, this film looks at one of the most embarrassing moments of this current failed American war — Abu Ghraib. Morris essentially allows the US Servicemen and women involved to give the context (and often rationalization) for each of the famed pictures. In his typical modernist way, Morris gives the viewer few objective handles to judge the interviewees stories.

What worked brilliantly in Fog of War falters here. The music (Danny Elfman channeling Philip Glass) is too bombastic, the graphics (done by my former employer Kyle Cooper) are too slick, and Morris’ trademark reenactments are too beautiful for the subject matter. The pictures are horrific and the servicemen and women are too raw and conflicted to justify such an overblown approach.

That being said, Standard Operating Procedure raises some very uncomfortable questions. Primarily, there’s one of guilt. Sure, most of the interviewees are guilty of mistreating prisoners. And their defense is something along the lines of “I was just following orders.” Nuremberg declared that such an argument doesn’t hold water. And while I agree with that in principle, I came away from the film feeling sorry for the poor schmucks, most straight out high school, who were put into a morally gray if not contradictory situation with intentionally vague instructions. (I wonder how my opinion would have changed if the movie interviewed the Iraqi prisoners in those pictures.

All of them draw a line between abuse and standard operating procedure. Making some guy jerk off or piling prisoners in a human pyramid is abuse, while stripping some guy naked, putting panties on his head and handcuffing him in an uncomfortable position is standard operating procedure. It strikes me, as a civilian, that that’s a very subtle and easily crossed distinction.

The film argues that Lynndie England and the others were punished more because they embarrassed the Pentagon that for an crime. One poor guy was sentenced to a year in the brig. Why? Because he appeared in an Abu Ghraib video cutting of the flex cuffs of a prisoner whose hands were turning purple. Though this torture strategy originated at the highest levels of government , no one above Staff Sargent was criminally punished. Guilt, according to the government, is not based on what you do, but whether or not you’re caught. That sort of mindset, that like an amoral seven-year old, has been the standard operating procedure for this administration. And as the years pass, Abu Ghraib might seem quaint compared to the horrors that Bush Co. have for now managed to hide away. That’s the thing about guilt, and nationhood. Just like the German people bare responsibility for Hitler and the Japanese bare (still officially unacknowledged) responsibility for Hirohito’s crimes in China, so does the American people share guilt about Bush’s crimes. And it drives me crazy.

The Garfield Factor: James A. Garfield, 20th president of the US, would have been largely baffled by the modernist sensibilities, finding it too disjointed and morally fuzzy. He would have undoubtedly found the Abu Ghraib pictures unsettling, not for their brutality, Pres. Garfield was a general in the Union army, but for their near pornographic unseemliness. Most likely, we would have poured himself a glass of whiskey and tried to blot the whole thing out of his mind by studying his beloved ancient Greek texts.